Marcus Ting-A-Kee has assembled a great presentation on the value to his company of requirements management tools. In addition to creating the presentation and sharing it with all of us, he shares the process of creating the presentation in several articles.
The Final Product
Marcus made his presentation available to us via his esnip account (v 1.2 is the one I reviewed). Even if you aren’t interested in the genesis of the presentation, you should get it and read it. And if you don’t care about pitching for requirements management tools, you want to get the presentation anyway – it is a fantastic real-world example of many of the Beyond Bullets and Presentation Zen techniques.
Marcus’ effective use of imagery is the reason we have images with our articles. So effective on his site that we couldn’t pass them up here. I’ve been learning from him ever since – and in the presentation – even more and better use. Images supplant text, instead of just augmenting it.
The Approach
Marcus does it exactly right – he develops an understanding of his audience, including their goals, needs, and backgrounds. Then he designs a presentation to show how their goals are addressed, in a language that is consistent with their backgrounds – he adapts to the context of the listener. Awesome. Then he iterates and builds out the presentation.
Targeting his communication for his audience makes more of a difference than anything. Funny how few people do it.
The Genesys
Check out Marcus’ work and progress via his articles:
- Part 1 – Purpose
- Part 2 – Research
- Part 3 – Planning and Execution
- Part 4 – Iteration and Execution
- Part 5 – Completion
- Part 6 – Postmortem
Conclusion
Marcus creates better presentations than we do. Maybe next time we can get him to videotape it – he probably delivers them better too. Thanks for sharing this stuff with us!
